Saturday, April 10, 2010

The Non-Ipad

I didn't coordinate on purpose but it happened to be the same day as the Ipad release that I went into Best Buy and asked them to show me the machine with the longest-life battery. They were a bit vague on the concept but after a couple of minutes they took me to a Gateway netbook with, it says here, battery life of eight hours. I said "you talked me into it," and for about $350 I left with my new toy indispensable life extension.

I've used it every day since I bought it. I don't really believe the eight-hour stuff and I haven't really tried to drain it but it does indeed seem to harbor more endurance than any machine I ever owned (it's been on and off all day; at 93%, it promised me 8hrs 10 mins; now at 62 % it offers only 3 hrs 50 mins, but even the lower number is longer than any battery I've ever owned.

I've fitted it with Firefox, Open Office, My Dropbox and Evernote--also a Kindle Reader link. I test drove the reader this morning and I noted a couple of advantages over the real Kindle--one, backlight; and two, easy back-and-forth to links from Kindle to Firefox. My Dropbox synched just fine. Evernote seems a bit cramped, but doable.

The keyboard is more usable than the last netbook I bought last year (an Acer; I fried it on European current). And so far I have used up only about 10 percent of the storage.

do let the battery drain all the way to zero every so often (once a month-ish). Laptop batteries need to cycle through to keep vigorous for reasons having to do with chemistry that I cannot understand.

Your East coast niece took your East coast sister to see netbooks the last time I was at her house. Folks in Bermuda had one while she was there and she became intrigued. It would be to replace her desktop. I think it is to small and it should be in addition to a new computer. More for her to think about.